Children tell themselves in Video 2024
Summary and future programmes
The first event
The first exhibition of the project Children tell themselves in Video took place in Brescia on 19 and 20 October 2024. It was an opportunity to establish contacts with several operators and realities in Italy and the world and to frame the reasons, perspectives and problems of activities that take place across school and society, between opportunities and contradictions.
In the meeting on Saturday 19 at Parco dell’Acqua , we discussed how to continue, in practice, with a useful and functional online platform and various activities remotely and in presence, overcoming the difficulties encountered in preparing the review, especially with schools.
Opportunities and problems
The project has partners in various parts of the world, with theoretically huge opportunities, but it is especially in Italy and particularly in schools that making and sharing video works with children is not easy.
There is the general context, the non-stop connection in which we are today and tell ourselves to be immersed, always with the eyes to the mobile phone, that works mainly in a vertical way, with the continuous bombardment of news and advertising by the big Web operators and the market, while in a horizontal sense, even when we try to go beyond the banalities and fights on social networks, we easily get scattered: we did good things, We exchanged experiences and ideas, we also produced texts, images, videos, real and not trivial content... But now what do we do with it? How do we share all this outside of our group so that it can be known, how do we organize it in a way that makes it usable?
Moreover, while from social networks the Web companies accumulate all kinds of personal data and automatically in their clouds even the images that we produce with mobile phones and other devices increasingly less controllable, like meta glasses, in schools the rules for the distribution of photographs and videos showing "minors" are often applied obsessively, as if showing their faces was not just a matter of privacy, but really represented an imminent danger. So they effectively renounce an active use of the most widespread language on the planet, universal alphabet of the information society and, not educating children to a responsible use of the means of production of images that from childhood handle, they are left outside the classrooms with their mobile phones completely at the mercy of the market.
Then, even when resistance and fears are overcome and video productions are even encouraged by the institutions - in Italy, for example, with the school film courses and workshops promoted by the ministry - the fact that children can play with the media and independently develop content and language and tell about themselves in an original way - one of the basic ideas of our project - is not normally taken into account.
In the classes, for the most part, cinema is taught, often by repeating old didactic techniques, of when audiovisual production was not as mass as today, and then they are engaged in works that deal mainly with pre-established themes, bullying, inclusion, ecology, memory. And the resulting works, worthy of commitment, study and research, are easily stereotyped, rarely interesting outside the school circle and - it was stressed during the group discussion - ultimately boring. Hardly anyone expects the very young to do more.
Local and global networks
At the local level, in Brescia and surroundings, in seeking relationships and relationships, beyond the difficulties we have identified school realities where children and young people produce video and multimedia works not confined within institutions, in the didactics or in the relationship with families, but that are open to the territory, consciously actively making culture in society, together with different subjects, public and private.
At the global level, national and international links must find simple and effective ways to keep alive, stimulate non-episodic exchange of ideas and participation in their respective initiatives, building a common or anyway shared culture and practices.
Drawing up schemes and maps of connections, local and global, existing, possible or even missing, it can, from the analysis of reality, help to build those networks that have been talked about for years but that, outside of specialized contexts and really competent in the application of technologies, mostly they do not work, do not find the appropriate "interfaces". While old working styles, combined with new forms of market, prevail, so that we exploit in an extremely partial and distorted way the enormous opportunities which, within a very short time, we all have had at our disposal and which for the most people, at the beginning of their lives, careers and training, they were not even imaginable in science fiction.
An online multimedia library, the organization
We started to collect in a media library on the Web the addresses of children’s video works, in direct connection, by email, by phone, on social networks, with those who have published them. To give at least a little idea of the quantity and variety of video productions by children in the world, beyond the stereotypes that would see them attracted only by Tik Tok.
Now, starting with the group involved in the exhibition just concluded, defining in a precise way availability and tasks, even minimal, of those who choose to participate, it is necessary to establish something like a administration, an editorial staff, which organizes and maintains the platform and website so that the visitor is not left alone with himself, but helped to orient through pleasant and interesting guided tours.
We need to seek a constant relationship with the interlocutors - schools, trainers, researchers, associations, educational institutions at all levels, events and festivals in the world, students, interested citizens - who follow us even from afar, by publishing periodic updates and news letters, the timely reporting of what we do and what is reported to us, the visible application of advice and suggestions that come to us, so as to solicit free and spontaneous forms of participation.
Work, initially on a voluntary basis, as soon as the minimum mechanisms of operation have been identified, must find ways to reimburse and eventually pay some figures for part-time but continuous activities on which one can count. This requires administrative support from an organization rooted in the sector, to which it can rely for the project, bureaucratic and financial part.
In addition to seeking sponsors and collaborations and bidding for calls, we may aim at organizing courses, workshops, seminars, online and in-person conferences, and other activities based on the skills and professionalism of the network participants, that through coordination can improve.
Gli obiettivi
"Finding evidence of children's voices in history!" is a sentence that was written to me in a chat and that sums up well the way the project can be projected outside, towards public opinion.
Given the low importance usually attributed to children’s works, it is necessary to learn to look inside, to pull out and highlight those parts where they go beyond, when they help each other in discovering the means, beyond what an adult could them "teach", they observe the world through the lens and discover and show us a reality transformed by wonder, play, irony, and a "child logic" that knows how to establish different relationships between people, things and facts. Beyond the ritual lessons of the masters, the formal correctness of languages, or the conformism of trendy formats and channels.
Through a work of "digital archaeology" that brings to light also multimedia finds buried and forgotten in the decades, we can reveal a childhood that is not imagined by common sense, educated by school, explained by psychologists, but it is told directly by the protagonists, thanks to the use of easy and powerful means that for several years now are available also to children.
Percorsi di lavoro
Dato il sito web esistente e la rete di contatti, si tratta ora di lavorare su alcuni punti:
Paolo Beneventi, Brescia, 7 novembre 2024
